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MATLIT 4.2 (2016): 99-117. ISSN 2182-8830 http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-2_5
Building Community through a Digital
Literature Archive: The Case of Ciberia Project M
ARÍAG
OICOECHEAComplutense University of Madrid
L
AURAS
ÁNCHEZComplutense University of Madrid
Abstract
Ciberia Project has emerged around the creation of Ciberia, a digital archive dedicated to digital literature in Spanish, with the purpose of making its contents more widely shared and fostering community building around digital literature. This project in- tends to function as a platform for a community interested and/or specialized in new creative forms of literary publishing, using the Ciberia database as the confluence point and origin of collective interaction, creation and reflection on digital literature and its ramifications in the field of literary publishing. This paper provides a descrip- tion of the digital library Ciberia, and its spin-off, the web platform Ciberia Project, offering a detailed account of their structure and potentialities. Keywords: Spanish digital literature; social networking; digital archives; digital publishing; OdA; CLAVY.
Resumo
O Ciberia Project surgiu a partir de Ciberia, um arquivo digital dedicado à literatura digital em espanhol, com o objetivo de disseminar o seu conteúdo e contribuir para a criação de uma comunidade em torno da literatura digital. O projeto pretende funcio- nar como plataforma para uma comunidade interessada e/ou especializada em novas formas criativas de publicação literária, usando a base de dados Ciberia como ponto de confluência e de origem para interação coletiva, criação e reflexão sobre a literatura digital e as suas ramificações no campo da publicação literária. Este artigo apresenta a biblioteca digital Ciberia, e o seu produto derivado, a plataforma web Ciberia Project, descrevendo detalhadamente a sua estrutura e potencialidades. Palavras-chave:
literatura digital em espanhol; redes sociais; arquivos digitais; publicação digital; OdA, CLAVY.
igital Humanities forums are populated by case studies such as this one, i.e. papers based on sharing pioneering experiences with data management systems, aimed at shedding some light on the hard task of constructing ex nihilo, in the digital space, forms of human interaction that were traditionally performed in physical environments or were simply not facilitated. The difficulty very often resides in stepping outside academic environments to reach a wider audience, the type of audience that can make certain projects prosper or collapse under the weight of data trash and obliv-
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100 María Goicoechea and Laura Sánchez
ion. Ciberia Project is one of these nascent creatures, which hesitantly gives its first steps in the direction of opening the field of digital literature to read- ers and writers aloof of the existence of the field, as well as providing a site of encounter for isolated creators and readers already interested in it.
Our first step is to present the Ciberia Project to the digital literature community. The nucleus of Ciberia Project is the archive Ciberia: Biblioteca de literatura digital en español, which is engaged in the creation of a theoretical context for teaching and researching digital literature. The goal of this project is to provide an infrastructure around the archive that will help disseminate research about digital literature, offer a collaborative setting for the creation of digital literature pieces and make digital culture in general more accessible to readers in Spanish. For that purpose, we have created a digital magazine, with an embedded social network, in which we have also integrated the li- brary, as we will describe later. The project also involves the creation of a publishing label that will experiment with new modes of digital editing.
Therefore, the Ciberia Project has evolved from the function of archiv- ing digital literature (Fig. 1) to that of promoting digital literature at other levels (Fig. 2), by defending digital literature as a field inside the Digital Hu- manities that can offer exciting reading experiences, and become a lab of creative publishing and collaborative experimentation.
Figure 1. Ciberia Digital Library Homepage.
